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Leverage Serverless Computing

Focus on your product, forget the infrastructure.

Server maintenance—local or on the cloud—has its own set of woes. Smart businesses are adopting compute services such as AWS Lambda to totally avoid the hassles of provisioning and managing servers, where possible.

Serverless application model (SAM), serverless code architecture, or Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)—call it what you will, but the benefits of going “serverless” are irrefutable. The service model of paying only for the computing power and storage used is gaining momentum, especially in the light of IoT devices and big data applications that demand elastic scaling.

Microservices with Serverless Architecture

Decouple your application into smaller services; for instance, one for delivering alert messages, another service for viewing user details, and yet another for authentication. Each of these services can be deployed as a function. The FaaS provider will fire up the infrastructure to process the request when a function is triggered and kill it when processing is complete.

Automatic Scaling and Load Balancing

Let your team focus on building app features instead of scaling servers. With no servers to manage, the team just needs to write and upload functions. As function call rate increases, processes will run in parallel, scaling according to the size of the load. Not one worry about distributing traffic or firing up additional servers.

The Economics of Serverless Model

FaaS pricing models are based on the computing power utilized. Prices are calculated on the basis of requests processed and the execution time, as opposed to resources provisioned. Switching to serverless computing can therefore help to bring down operational costs considerably.

Adoption of serverless model also reduces human effort. You no longer need an IT personnel to manage server instances. Functions trigger tasks such as shutting down servers during weekends or when traffic is low.

Why pay for servers when all you need them is for a fraction of a second?

Consider a typical scenario where your application is hosted on a cloud server. If requests to the application are few and far between, running the server 24/7 is a waste of resource as well as money. You could leverage FaaS to deploy an individual function to process the request and terminate. With an average EC2 instance costing around $2.5 per day, imagine how much you can save!

3 Reasons to Go Serverless

1

Minimize infrastructure and operational costs

2

Scale up or down without a worry

3

Speed up development and deployment

Choose Your FaaS Provider

With big names such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google along with smaller players like Webtask.io, the FaaS landscape is already crowded. We help clients choose the best provider to support their use case.

IBM Cloud Functions

Webtask.io

Google Cloud Functions

MS Azure Functions

AWS Lambda

As a certified development partner, we can easily work with AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or Google Cloud Functions to process events with a serverless architecture while combining it with other services offered by the provider. Our development team is skilled in the supported languages, such as Node.js or Python.

Powered by AWS Lambda

Fitness logger is an Alexa skill that enables users to store and keep track of their daily workouts via voice commands. This winning entry to the Amazon Alexa Skills Contest is implemented on a serverless architecture.

Lambda is the recommended platform for building Alexa skills. Fitness logger developed using Node.js taps into this and can be set up in three simple steps:

Deploy the code in AWS Lambda.

Configure the Alexa skill to use Lambda.

Create a MySQL instance in Amazon RDS.

When to Opt for Serverless Architecture

While it is trendy and promising, a serverless architecture is better suited for certain applications. Scheduled tasks or timer-based events, mobile and IoT backends, real-time processing of streaming data as in clickstream analysis may benefit from a serverless model. An experienced development team can identify what part of the app can be run as FaaS and which tasks should be on a dedicated server.

Schedule a consultation with one of our senior architects to discuss serverless computing in your business case.